Highlighting the obtuse, the slanted and sometimes just plain ignorant writings found in The Gray Lady

Month: February 2017

The world of color commentators in college basketball is a wasteland of crotchety bald old men who suck and wheeze at the altar of teams like Duke and Kentucky. Dick Vitale weens and creens and screams till his pampers are wet. Jay Bilas does erudite like a pigeon in a pole barn. Bill Raftery’s patented shtick after a big play is a bellowing grunt like a long-constipated warthog.

ESPN and CBS stay with these bald, bellicose announcers out of lazy, obliterated habit. If you had grandfathers like this you’d long ago have pushed them in front of the crosstown bus.

Then there’s Dan Dakich.

Dakich is the lightning rod color commentator who singularly turns a game into an event. His background as a player, coach and commentator is a string of significant diversions away from the what the public usually gets fed from the Pollyanna media elite.

During a recent Michigan State game the entire student section repeated chants of “We hate Dakich” in an attempt to distract opposing basketball players. Why? Because of some previous animated Dakich tweets he’d sent out sparring with MSU fans.

In the Ohio State/Wisconsin game he came out and laughingly stated how much he hated team mascots, and one particular mascot he wanted to “pull off his head and beat him to death with it.”

You’d never hear that from any other announcer. But who hasn’t felt that way about those obnoxious mascots?

What happened? Brutus Buckeye, the Ohio State mascot, came over behind Dakich and started a riotously great routine, giving him backrubs for love and finally sticking his finger in Dakich’s ear. The crowd – and the cameras – loved it. Along with Dakich.

He knows basketball and pulls out the minutiae that make a game more interesting while educating the viewers. And when he goes off on tangents they’re almost always funny. (Very much unlike Dick Vitale who during one game drifted off to talk on and on about football till his partner embarrassingly pulled him back.)

So, thanks to Dan Dakich for really bringing the color back into the color commentator.

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Oh, and for those who don’t know, Dakich, playing for Bob Knight’s Hoosiers, single-handedly shut down Michael Jordan in the 1984 NCCA tourney in a masterly defensive effort that introduced the world to his patented “Dakich Defensive Duck Stance.” (Oddly, it never caught on.)

Jordan was so embarrassed by Dakich that he quit college ball and took off for the NBA, where he knew defense was actively discouraged.

The AARP organization – a legal non-profit – is surprising their members with their full-blown support of Donald Trump.

The fact that the AARP organization has swung around to being a Right-Wing political lobbying weapon whose top leadership is so gung-ho on Trump has raised the concerns of many members.

Meanwhile, the CEO of AARP has been featured prominently in national ads trying to sell multiple services – unwanted by most Americans – instead of doing the good work she’s supposed to be doing: Assisting those 50 and over who are simply scraping by.

When an AARP mass email went out to members touting how The Donald is their friend, lot’s of AARP members questioned whether AARP was their friend.

Donald Trump has just signed an executive order giving carte blanche to Wall Street traders to seek their own profits irregardless of their client’s best interests. This means Wall Street can gamble on their own with clients money – gambling with retirement savings – without any repercussions.

Just WHY would a president eliminate the only laws in place that protect individual investors? And WHY does AARP think this is a great idea?